AAS 220: Blogs

Professor Hattori

Setting up your Blog

Step 1: Create a google account, or sign in with your google account if you already have one. http://www.blogger.com.

Step 2: Create a blog. Choose a title for your blog, and check the availability of the blog's address you want. For example, mine is http://dirkins.blogspot.com/.

Step 3: Choose a starter template. (You can always change it later.)

Step 4: Start customizing the look of your blog!

Customizing Your blog

Use the Blogger Template Designer to choose a template, layout, background and more. The Layout section guides what will be placed where on your blog.

Once you've finished, click "Back to Blogger."

In "Layout", you can add "Gadgets" to your page, including an "about me" section and others. Play around with it to see if you want to add anything. This is where your blog archive will be. (Don't forget to hit save when you make any changes.)

Go to the "Settings" section to make sure all of the settings are set to what you want.

Posting

You're ready to start posting, so click the "new post" button. It's super easy to create a post. Make sure you add a title first, and then go for it. You can either do your own html coding by choosing the "edit html" tab, or use the editor by choosing the "compose" tab. You can switch back and forth between the two if you need to. When you're on the "Compose" tab, you'll see lots of options like font, size, bold, italicize, alignment and adding links, images and videos. Experiment with these to see what happens. Click the "publish" button at the top of the page to publish your post. You can always go back and edit or delete any post you create.

Labels

It's important to add "Labels" to your blog. These are sometimes known as tags. It helps to categorize your posts. Try to think of descriptive labels if you're going to use them. You can list your labels either in list or cloud form by adding them to a "gadget" on your page.

From blogger.com about using labels: "Labels are handy if you blog about a lot of different subjects, since readers can then choose to view all of your posts on, say, dancing at once. Or politics, or knitting, or whatever you happen to be writing about. If you have a team blog, you could also give each member their own label, so you could easily read all the posts by any one of them. Feel free to come up with other creative new uses as well!"

Adding images and videos

You can easily add images and videos to your posts in a number of ways. For images, you can upload pictures from your hard drive, your Google Photos (aka Picasa) account (if you have one), and you can link to images online. Be careful with this last option, and make sure you have the rights to link to or use an image before doing so. One place to look for images is Flickr's Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ . Be sure to read and understand how to use these images, and what your responsibility is (ie giving credit to the creator etc.)

For videos, you can add your own clips, clips from Youtube or other online sites like Hulu. Youtube clips are the easiest with Blogger. For other online clips, like through Hulu, you'll want to use the "Embed" code often found under the clip. And once you've got that, you need to add it to the code of your post, making sure you're in the "Edit html" tab.

Research?

Don't forget, just because you're writing online (instead of turning in a traditional paper), you still have to do research! You can't just make things up or plagiarize from somewhere else. You must learn how to find and use credible sources.